


All Things That Grow and Are Not Barren

by Saentorine



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings (Movies), The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, F/M, Fatherhood, Female Characters, Female Protagonist, Fertility Issues, Gen, Gender Roles, Grief/Mourning, Healers, Healing, Married Couple, Mentors, Miscarriage, Motherhood, Parenthood, Platonic Female/Female Relationships, Pregnancy, Purple Prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 09:10:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9172870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saentorine/pseuds/Saentorine
Summary: A newly-healed and married Eowyn planned on a fruitful, fertile life as a healer in the lush forests and gardens of Ithilien but feels the return of familiar darkness when her own body struggles with creating and sustaining life.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Miscarriage is in the tags, so avoid if you need to avoid. Also includes references to menstruation, vaginal discharge, etc.

Eowyn never expected to want so badly to be a mother.

As a girl, babies had been all noise, smell, and burden. Being asked to mind them held no joy or pride, but kept her from horseback and wild active games alongside her brother and cousin. As she grew the girls who had fought to hold babies became women who bore their own, placing them in her arms and teasing her for her obvious discomfort and how quickly she preferred to pass them back.

But of course, they had never been _her_ babies.

In this new peace of a world freed from the peril that nearly killed her, waking from the hope of death she nursed for so long, she finds her heart has changed in this regard as well. When she thinks of her own childhood of stories told fireside and games of alongside her brother and cousin, she finds herself also thinking of the stories she might tell her own and the smiles and laughter evoked in play that might belong to her. When she remembers Theoden, Theodred, and her own parents lost, she thinks of how she might help to fill the veins of the next generation with the pride and valor of her family. When she looks on her husband, she thinks that knowing a child by him would be one more way to make the love she has for him whole, and ponders curiously the possibilities of what a blending of their bodies would produce.

When she announces this new-inspired desire to Faramir, he bites his lip to keep from smiling at her apparent naivety. “I do not know what we might try other than what we are already doing, but we may try more diligently if you will it, my lady,” he says. Since their marriage-- in truth, since their _pledge_ for marriage; it was the mere profession of love that inspired their consummation, not the ceremony, though of course this is secret from their king, their subjects, and especially Eomer-- their lovemaking has been frequent and robust. She flushes red and makes a playful swipe at his arm-- for all the crass words and lewd tales she has heard growing up with brother and boy-cousin, motherless from childhood she is self-conscious of how little she knew of these matters before she was wed—but all too soon the playful shoving turns into a bout of a different kind, clothing cast aside.

Eowyn’s new resolve does not change their habits, nor the outcome, but it changes how she feels about it. If physical love is what makes a child, and theirs has always been robust yet in nearly a year has not yet resulted in one . . . what is wrong?

She has never in her life rejoiced her monthly blood and the pain and fatigue that accompanies it, but after several more months of hoping, its arrival begins to provoke tears of disappointment as well.

“I did not marry you to be a broodmare,” Faramir assures her over and over again. 

However, once, when his own disappointment gives way and cannot be disguised, he says with resignation: “My father thought he foresaw that the line of Anárion would end with me. Perhaps he was not wrong, but only misinterpreted the means by which our line would fail. You must not blame yourself for what may be all to do with me.”

It gives her no comfort at all to hear her husband assume culpability, and the prospect of proving Denethor right-- this specter from her husband’s past that still conflicts him but for whom she has no cause for sympathy, would-be filicidal coward as she sees him who kept to his high tower while _her_ people rode and died defending it, and whose memory still claws at Faramir’s peace long after his death-- only adds bitterness to her frustration.

She is mad with anticipation when the cycle of the moon heralds the scheduled coming of her blood, checking her smallclothes for the tiniest twinge of pink and heart falling every time it does. 

However, when two summer months pass without its arrival, and she notices she is more easily made weary, affected profoundly by the smells of rich food, and her breasts strangely full with some hidden change in her body, she confesses her suspicions to her husband. His eyes fly open wide and he drops his book to run to take her waiting hands and kiss her. Although the life inside is still impossibly small, any swell in her middle only the consequence of their more leisurely lives in the peace of Ithilien after the harshness of battle, he lays his palms upon her belly to greet the child within. Through the end of summer and into autumn they argue over variations of Boromir and Théoden for his name—“or Bromwyn or Theodwyn for _her_ ,” Eowyn always adds-- and imagine a future for the unborn child, how they might look and what they might fancy as they grow. 

Despair is all the darker after this sweetness when Eowyn’s blood returns before autumn ends, heavy and painful and clotted. She is no stranger to blood and the death of innocents, and yet this murder her body has committed without her consent strikes her with a grief she is entirely unprepared for. 

She is alone when she discovers it, and at first she intends to keep it concealed until her heart has truly understood the certainty of it, but there is far too much blood and her stifled crying when she returns to the bedroom wakes him. He holds her close to him but she can barely feel his touch, disconnecting from the body that has betrayed her. 

The blood flows for more than a week but her tears for longer. She came to Ithilien with the hope of life and growth in the lush forest and the gardens she tends, but now she wonders if they cursed the child to consider naming her for loved ones tragically cut down, dooming her to the same fate. She wonders if the prospect of birth is incompatible with the life of violence and death she lived in her girlhood, that it would be impossible for one so well-acquainted with killing to create life. She even wonders if it is a punishment of sorts, penance for all the many years she wished for herself the duties assigned to men—so that now she is incapable of this most fundamental task of womanhood. Perhaps she is still damaged; perhaps the Shadow has not fully fled from her soul.

She has no appetite-- not for food, nor for the bliss of her marriage bed. Faramir is hurt as she cringes from his hand. “If we do not try, failure is assured,” he whispers, unsure of his place to contest her refusal.

He is right, of course, but for now she dare not link the shadows of grief to the comfort of her husband’s touch. Though they share their bed, for the length of a winter it is cold.

In the spring Faramir is summoned as steward to the king’s side for some matters pertaining to the influx of Elves to their region. He suggests that while they are in Minas Tirith they might seek the healing hands of the king once again, but Eowyn refuses as she has never more heartily refused her husband. She is long past bitterness for how the king once spurned her attentions, which for her part had never truly been _love_ , either-- not love as she knows it now-- but to come with intimate, feminine concerns before the man who once counseled her place in the home when all need demanded the able-bodied accompany him is a humiliation she will not subject herself to. Besides, the queen’s womb is yet no less empty than her own; perhaps this is magic he does not know.

However, when they are in the White City and her husband is at court, she does find herself wandering the familiar halls of the Houses of Healing which she had once so desperately longed to escape but now finds to be a comfort to her, reminding her of the rebirth of a hope in a time when it had been all but lost to her.

She is startled to encounter the familiar wizened face of Ioreth, still tending to the few that require her ministrations in the new peace of Minas Tirith. “Always so somber, my little daughter of Rohan,” Ioreth nearly laughs as she recognizes her, and Eowyn frowns to be patronized as a child and famed for her sadness more than her strength. 

“I have much reason to be somber,” Eowyn replied, unable to help placing her hands on her empty belly, “failing to create and sustain life as I vowed when I was healed.”

At this Ioreth’s smile closes but her bright eyes do not stray from hers, and she is earnest when she speaks, laying a gentle hand upon her hair as a mother would upon her daughter. “You have stood down monsters of the like few men have faced, much less survived. But in _this_ I share your grief-- and threefold, for that is how many I have carried but not bore.”

It takes a moment for Eowyn to comprehend her, so lost in her own grief, just as long ago it had taken her so much time to recognize the kindred sadness in the man who had quietly remained at her side as they waited for the return of the Grey Company and the long winter to recede.

“I have two sons and four daughters all with babes of their own-- though they too have lost a handful between them,” she explains. “It is the way of things-- be it some blood price, or simply the failings of the form of man-- that not all babes will be born.”

Eowyn resents being likened to a child but realizes that despite all she has done in her young life, she _is_ but a child in this womanly knowledge, the strange, sad statistics of motherhood which growing up motherless from childhood in the care of uncle, brother, and boy-cousin she never had cause to know.

Never short on words, as Eowyn recalls from her long hours in convalescence, Ioreth speaks to her for some time on the babes she has lost, the names she gave them although she never held them in her arms. In time Eowyn’s voice rises softly to give name to her own lost hope, what she does not know but cannot help but imagine to have been a little girl with her own wild golden hair and Faramir’s gentle eyes.

Later, Ioreth brews her tea of clover and nettles, showing her how to do the same for herself-- and any others she might teach in Ithilien, where she already has practiced healing on a few. She teaches her to count the days between her blood and observe the changes in the wetness in her smallclothes to measure her fertility. She counsels her to sustain herself on hearty fare, to ease her mind and treat her body kindly so that it might be kind to the hope of fragile life. She gives her sachets of more tea and lands a bolstering slap to her rear as she sends her out with a directive: “Now go to thy husband, or this will all be for naught.”

It is easier to try again as they remain in the White City for another month. Spring in Minas Tirith reminds them of the days in which their love was new and they were simply grateful to be alive and healed as the Shadow lifted and their world was cast in sunlight again. If they have survived so much already they can survive this; she has been surprised by her own resilience before.

It does not happen immediately, it happens in its own time, but by the following winter her body wakes of its own winter, blooming with the glow of life inside once again. She is more fearful and cautious this time but nurses a quiet hope and finally, on a late summer morning-- heralded by a great deluge between her legs that Eowyn remarks wryly reminds her of Faramir’s dream of a great wave that day they waited upon the wall-- and several hours of pain and concentration of the like she has not faced since battle, she welcomes the bright-eyed, brown-haired boy they name Elboron.

When she regains her strength she returns to her healing work, busy in her gardens and out among the people she tends, loving all things that grow and even those that are barren, coaxing life as best she can from those who have lost all hope of renewal as she has now twice learned for herself.


End file.
